Semiconductor processing has continued to improve steadily, allowing the fabrication of smaller and smaller devices. This trend shows little signs of abating.
Effective device densities and integrated circuit (IC) capacity improve at an exponential rate. Presently, microprocessor operational performance increases by roughly 60% per year while the number of gates increases by 25% per year. Three million gates are available for current microprocessors and over 12 million gates is expected by the end of the century.
As gate densities have improved, more of the computing system has been integrated onto the microprocessor die and larger processors have been implemented. What started as minimal instruction stream control and a simple, 4-bit, ALU has grown with the available area to include multiple 64-bit functional units including hardwired floating-point support. The basic microprocessor design has expanded to include large, on-chip memories to prevent off-chip input and output (i/o) latency from significantly degrading performance, thereby increasing instruction throughput. Today's high-performance microprocessors move towards higher execution rates using aggressive pipelining and superscalar execution utilizing multiple functional units. Cost consciousness motivates the integration of the common system and peripheral functions onto the IC die to reduce system cost and power consumption.
On a different front, reconfigurable logic has emerged as a commodity technology comparable to memories and microprocessors. Like memories, reconfigurable logic arrays rapidly adapt to new technology since the design consists of an array of simple structures. Also like memory, the regularity allows designers to focus on adapting the key logic structures to extract the highest performance from the available technology. Each reconfigurable array can be designed and tested in a single IC design yet gains volume from the myriad of diverse applications to which the general-purpose array is applied.